Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Three years after the Coalition took power, Labour has gone nowhere, very, very slowly

Labour's clock has stopped, but everyone else's is ticking on remorselessly

A few weeks ago, as Labour’s local election campaign began in earnest, a clock appeared on the wall of the Party’s headquarters in Brewers Green. It showed the days, hours and minutes until the 2015 general election.

A little while after it had been installed a member of staff glanced up at it. Where previously it had said there were 758 days to the election, it now claimed there were 759. Labour’s election clock was going backwards.

It’s a perfect metaphor for where Ed Miliband and his troops find themselves after last week’s county council results. Labour is going backwards. Or, if you prefer, Labour has spent the best part of the last three years going precisely nowhere.

Last week Labour got 29 per cent of the national vote. That is the same share of the vote it got in the 2010 general election. OK, some of that can be accounted for by the distorting impact of Ukip. But 29 per cent is 29 per cent.

Then there are the opinion polls. Polls go up and polls go down. But at the moment Labour is bouncing around in the range 37 per cent to 39 per cent. That’s basically where Labour’s been since August 2010, just before Ed Miliband was elected leader.

To be fair, at that time the Tories were themselves still polling in the high 30s to low 40s, and their rating has slumped. But it hasn’t slumped towards Miliband.

Last week the Tories finished just four percentage points behind Labour. Four. Midterm. Economy staggering along the edge of the precipice. Richest one per cent toasting their 50p tax cut. And One Nation Labour could still only finish four points ahead of out-of touch posh boy David Cameron.

Even more staggering, that’s a four-point advantage at a time when Nigel Farage’s jugglers, trapeze artists and fire-eaters have managed to grab 23 per cent of the popular vote themselves. No one knows for sure how the Ukip surge will play itself out, but two things we can say with absolute certainty. They will not be securing 23 per cent at a general election, and the vast majority of those voters who do switch back will be switching back to the Conservative Party.

Speaking to Labour MPs and officials over the weekend, the mood was dark. As if, for the first time, people recognised the light ahead was indeed the onrushing train they’d feared.

Labour threw the kitchen sink at these elections. On Thursday I got a text from a Labour adviser: “Everyone’s out on the doorstep. From the General Secretary to the receptionist. I’ve never seen that before.” Given the outcome, we may never see it again.

Forget the spin about 200 seats. Labour had set 350 seats as their own minimum benchmark for success. “Mediocre at best,” was one analysis. “So what happened to those 500 seats we were going to get?” asked one shadow minister.

Some in Labour’s ranks have been quick to point the finger of blame at their door-knocking General Secretary, Ian McNicholl. But senior officials who have observed McNicholl at close quarters reject the criticism. “I was sceptical when Ian came in, but his changes at head office are starting to have an effect. He’s professionalising the operation. Bringing in some good people. The only problem is he doesn’t always get the full backing of the leader’s office.”

Someone who is in the frame after the poor results is Labour’s US election "guru" Arnie Graff. Experienced Labour insiders are becoming increasingly angry that their electoral strategy is being shaped by a man who, by his own admission, has no experience of working on a party political campaign. “There’s all this hype about him being Obama’s mentor,” said one insider. “But then you speak to him and you find out he’s not even a registered Democrat. He’d not do anything useful except staying in a lot of hotels and costing the party a lot of money.”

But Labour’s dire results on Thursday weren’t the result of poor organisation. They were the product of the party’s own self-delusion.

Everything Labour has been telling itself over the past three years has been a lie. Ed Miliband has not “earned the right to be listened to” by the electorate. Their perceptions of him are basically unchanged from that day in September 2010 when he walked on the stage in Manchester and accepted the leadership.

The “Producers and Predators” speech in 2011 did not, as his supporters have been claiming ever since, change the terms of the political debate. As we saw last week, the terms of the debate are being shaped by Nigel Farage and his populist Right-wing nationalism, not Miliband’s metropolitan liberalism.

“One Nation”, supposed to capture the mood of an austerity-wracked nation, has become a standing joke. Repeated ad nauseam by every Labour spokesman, it is now doing for Ed Miliband’s credibility what “The Big Society” did for David Cameron.

We were told phone hacking was the issue that would make the electorate look at Ed Miliband afresh, and frame him as a future prime minister. It wasn’t, and they didn’t. We were told the NHS reforms would be the “new poll tax”. They aren’t. We were promised Labour’s great "bedroom tax" campaign would produce a national revolt. Its political impact last Thursday was zero.

Remember too, when we were being told Ed Miliband was the leader who “always gets the big calls right”? In fact on Europe, welfare, the economy – the issues that will really shape the outcome of the next election – Labour’s leader continues to get the big calls totally and utterly wrong. That’s when he can be prevailed upon to make any call at all.

Even the myth of Labour unity has shown to be a sham. Len McCluskey and his child-soldiers continue to scour Labour’s ranks, looking for Blairites to purge, while the Blairite Pimpernel himself continues to launch a series of audacious hit-and-run raids, before shrinking back to the relative sanctuary of the Ambassador Hotel, Jerusalem.

Labour is effectively back where it started. A couple of months after the 2010 election, as the result finally sank in and it became clear Nick Clegg was indeed going to stick to his Faustian pact, a sizeable chunk of Lib Dem voters jumped ship to Labour.

And that’s it. That represents the extent of Labour’s political advance. Forget the new Disraeli. Ed Miliband is basically the new Harriet Harman.

Labour is not setting the agenda. It has few new policies of any real note. It has no coherent narrative, other than a desire to be seen to position itself to the Left of New Labour. It has not even begun to address the issue of how a party of the Left make itself relevant in an age of austerity. In fact, it is not even prepared to acknowledge we are living in age of austerity at all. Three years into opposition, Labour has a new leader and a new slogan. And precious little else.

Labour has wasted three years. And the election clock on the wall is moving inexorably forward.